Deconstruction and Critical Theory - surveys the main schools and theorists of Deconstruction - establishes their philosophical roots - traces their contribution to the understanding of literature and ideology - compares their critical value - explores the critical reaction to Deconstruction and its limitations. This is the ideal text for students who wish to understand how and why Deconstruction has become the dominant tool of the humanities. Peter V. Zima is Professor and Director of the Institute of General and Comparative Literature at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria. He is the author of a range of critical books including The Philosophy of Modern Literary Theory. Rainer Emig, the translator, is Professor of British Literature at the University of Regensburg, Germany.

The philosophical and aesthetic foundations of literary theories; Anglo-American new criticism and Russian formalism; Czech structuralism between Kant, Hegel and the avant-garde; problems of reader response criticism - from hermeneutics to phenomenology; from Marxism to critical theory and postmodernism; the aestheticis of semiotics - Greimas, Eco, Barthes; the nietzschean aesthetics of deconstruction; Lyotard's postmodern aesthetics and Kant's notion of the sublime; towards a critical theory of literature.